Set in Victorian Stone

It’s November, I’ve got a cold and I’ve hit a brick wall while revising The Horde of Mhorrer. I’ve spent the last three nights rewriting and revising half of Chapter 20 with all the skill of a short-sighted surgeon suffering an anxiety attack. I’ve written a total of 6,000 words, and two nights ago I deleted them all in despair as I realised this part of the re-write just didn’t work.

It’s not writer’s block, before anyone asks, and I suppose it’s not re-writer’s block either – but a severe lack of objectivity due to the intensive writing regime I’ve gone under to get the revisions done before Christmas. With three chapters to go, everything was revising smoothly. A distracting subplot was delicately removed and the book was looking pretty healthy.
It still is, but Chapter 20 now looks like one of the walking-wounded, and Chapter 21 might have to be re-written completely. So I’ve forced myself to cease editing for a few days in case I do something to the book I later regret…

…Yet as the dust settles about me, I have little chance to be idle. My imagination is difficult to switch off at the best of times, so I need to distract it for a few days with something else – the perfect opportunity then, to think about my preparation for 2008’s project:

The plot to The Black Hours is set in stone, as are the main characters, yet over the last couple of months the backdrop has been protean. I’ve looked at setting it in present-day Sheffield, Elizabethan England, New York, even on another planet, but there’s one setting I keep coming back to, time and time again: Victorian London in the 1890’s.
Now the difficulty with this setting isn’t that there’s bugger-all written about it, so it’s not hard to research; it’s actually the opposite. It seems every novel at the moment is set in Victorian London (as is almost every other Doctor Who episode). I recently scoured the internet, particularly Google’s Book search-engine, and the number of novels written for this period of history is phenomenal, especially in the fantasy/horror/sci-fi genres. Which is one of the reasons why I’ve looked for an alternative backdrop...

...But none of the other settings are good enough.

There’s something about Victorian London that provides so many possibilities. Which is probably why the setting is so popular. From crime to science-fiction, who can beat an exciting romp in the dark and dingy back-streets of 19th century London, with unspeakable characters lurking around every corner? I’ve dabbled in this setting before with a couple of chapters of The Secret War set in olde London town (my main characters fought vampires there in the British Museum), so the city in the 1800’s is no stranger to me. And like I said, there’s no shortage of reference material either – would you believe it, you can even buy 19th century street-maps of London from Amazon!

As for the politics of the time… bloody hell… Imagine wearing the most comfortable shoes ever made and that’s how well the politics of Victoria’s Britain fits the plot of The Black Hours. Even the U.S.’s current foreign policy isn’t a patch on the Great British Empire of the 19th century (The Black Hours will be political as well as a fantasy adventure).

So I’ve decided to stick with 1890’s Victorian London. It fits the plot, it fits the characters, like the period of history was tailored for The Black Hours. Sure, the backdrop isn’t particularly original, but it’s not the setting that’s important, but what the author does with it, right?